The Tory debacle: is Thatcher to blame?

The devastating rebuff administered to the Conservative Party by British voters in May of this year came as no surprise. The party was tired, publicly split on policy, and scandal-ridden. The voters did the party a favor by granting it respite from the rigors of office. But where does it go from here?

Ten years ago Lord Carrington wrote in his memoirs of the advantages of his time in Australia as governor-general in lending perspective to his assessment of Britain's true interests. Physical distance allowed him to see the wood from the trees. His insight can be used today in analyzing where the Conservatives went wrong. For the future health of the conservative cause in Britain, it is important that the party use its downtime well. It must get its post-mortem right.

Viewed from across the Atlantic, there is no mystery about how the Conservative Party was brought to its knees. This feat was accomplished by a leader who foisted upon it an untenable, crassly inconsistent policy based on a mixture of arrogance, ignorance, self-indulgence, and self-deception. The leader was Margaret Thatcher. The policy was Euro-rejectionism. The Conservatives have rid themselves of the former, but the latter lives on in the parliamentary party. In rejecting as its new leader former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke in favor of William Hague, a Thatcher protege, the party has shown that it is now dominated by those who believe that the only significant events in European history are the battles of Agincourt, Trafalgar, and Waterloo. This is not an electable party. If it is to regain the voters' confidence, it must purge itself of Thatcher's Euro-rejectionist incubus.

This thesis may require a little elaboration, but in fact the argument is straightforward. Compare the following quotations:

We must create the genuine common market in goods and services which is envisaged in the Treaty of Rome and will be crucial to our ability to meet the U.S. and Japanese technological challenge.

We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at the European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

The second is well known. Taken from the then-Prime Minister Thatcher's famous October 1988 speech to the College of Europe in Bruges, this represents her at the flood tide of her anti-federalist Euro-rejectionism. It is quoted with relish in her autobiography The Downing Street Years to illustrate her point that, in her own delicate phraseology, "I had had as much of the European 'ideal' as I could take."

The authorship of the first quotation seems more problematic. Its communautaire orthodoxy is reminiscent of an arch-federalist Brussels-based fonctionnaire who has "slipped his leash" (this phrase too belongs to Thatcher, used in reference to Jacques Delors, then-president of the European Commission), and who is scheming to foist his Napoleonic centralism on the unsuspecting Anglo-Saxons. But not so. Once again the speaker is Margaret Thatcher, on this occasion at the Fontainebleau European Summit of June 1984. She adopted this stance to show her European credentials, following the bruising decade-long debate about British financial contributions to Europe. In doing so, she launched the integrationist process that led to the Single European Act of 1985 and, by easily foreseeable extension, to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and to European Monetary Union.

Unsurprisingly, the 1984 speech receives no mention in Lady Thatcher's writings - or in those of her hagiographers. And when history confronts her with inconvenient facts, such as her first House of Commons speech as Tory leader in 1975 in which she robustly defended British EU membership, or her campaign in the same year for a positive vote on Harold Wilson's referendum over whether Britain should continue in Europe, she makes light of them by saying that these were Edward Heath's legacy.

To have admitted these facts would, of course, have exposed the fatal implausibility underlying Thatcher's European policy: namely that, rather than having to make the best of the relationship with Europe, Britain's leaders enjoyed the option of pursuing a non-EU-based alternative choice. As a rational person, Thatcher knew that this was the stuff of dreams and carefully avoided explicitly suggesting that Britain should leave Europe. However, anyone who saw her stiffen with misty pride whenever Old Glory was on display understood that, had it been available, Thatcher would have jumped at some kind of condominium pact with what she quaintly called the "new Europe across the Atlantic."

The manifest unworkability of this vision destroyed British influence in Europe. For the nation, the fruit was bitter: either British defeat or British opt-out. For the Prime Minister personally, the consequence was to strip away the aura of the Falklands victory and "Iron Lady" invincibility and to reveal her, in Geoffrey Howe's 1990 image, as a captain deliberately sabotaging her own team. When her own credibility was destroyed, so was that of the Conservative Party.

This foreign policy blunder was bad enough. But the fact that after her 1990 dismissal as party leader she waded ever more deeply into it compounded the problem. Where she should have helped John Major pursue hard-nosed calculation about how best to defend Britain's national interests in Europe, she indulged in romantic mythologizing about keeping the down-to-earth values of the Glorious Revolution safe from the utopian dreams of Europe's Jacobin intellectuals.

This clap-trap had two disastrous results. First, it opened a fissure in the Tory party so deep that in 1997 cabinet members were openly attacking each other on the hustings. Secondly, it destroyed public confidence in the Tories' ability to handle Britain's central foreign policy task. Torn apart by Thatcher's European folly, the Tories encountered a defeat that may deprive them of office for a generation.

The absurd part of this Euro-bashing myth is that it was wholly meretricious and self-serving. It was designed (and is maintained today) to disguise the fact that - apart from the anti-EU extremism of her latter years as prime minister and in retirement - Thatcher occupied a respectable place in the mainstream of British leadership opinion about Europe. Specifically, her outlook differed little from that of Harold Macmillan or Harold Wilson. Neither of these earlier prime ministers warmed to the idea of Europe. Macmillan in particular scorned the Six's first faltering steps. But both were converted to British membership through lack of an alternative, and both knew that, once in, Britain would often have to fight for her rights. Even Heath, by far the most pro-Europe of the Conservative prime ministers who negotiated Britain's accession, had no illusions about the sort of battles Britain would have to wage to defend her prerogatives. At his insistence, the accession document of 1972 contained specific language on this question.

This typically British approach was Thatcher's initial position. Indeed, she may have been somewhat more pro-Europe than average. From her first days in Parliament, she was a member of the European Union of Women, a pro-Europe advocacy group. She has recorded in her Road to Power that she was "wholeheartedly in favor of Britain's entry into the Common Market." In common with all her contemporaries, her reasoning revolved around trade and economics. This allowed her, as a member of Heath's cabinet at the time of the accession negotiations, to disregard Enoch Powell's warnings about potential European encroachment on British sovereignty as merely "technical." Later this same reasoning prompted her to go forward with the 1985 Single European Act that laid the foundation for the modern EU.

Had she stayed with this reasoning all might have been well. Her critics, even those like Geoffrey Howe and Douglas Hurd who are most contemptuous of her boorish antics, have conceded that many of her positions made sense. Her dogged demands in 1979-84 for a reduction in Britain's budgetary payments to Europe, for example, brought home to her European colleagues that centralized overspending could not continue. Her emphasis on local responsibility established the now-sacrosanct principle of "subsidiarity" in the European decision-making process, whereby decisions are devolved down to the lowest possible level.

These accomplishments were considerable. But they were not enough for Thatcher. Deriving a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority from her redoubtable Falklands victory, she began to wallow in the sentiment that the European structures were "quintessentially un-English." (Whether this also means un-Welsh, un-Scots, and un-Irish will necessarily be left to the imagination, for unfortunately there are now no Conservative Members of Parliament from these countries to enlighten us.)

The sentiment that, in terms of culture, the EU was irredeemably alien led Thatcher into dangerous waters. Not only did it convince her that saying "No, No, No" amounted to a sufficient European policy, but it also pushed her off her original (mainstream) position of defending British interests from within the EU. This was the position she had advanced with considerable tactical finesse at the 1988 Brussels European Council, where she traded concessions on structural funds in return for a long-term guarantee of Britain's budgetary rebate.

She now deserted that position. In her heart she began to question the very principles on which the EU was based. "Were British democracy and our traditional sense of fairness", she records herself as asking, "to be subordinated to the demands of a remote European bureaucracy resting on very different traditions?" She began to act as though she were the first person to discover that there was a potential conflict between British EU membership and British sovereignty.

The logical conclusion of this position, of course, went way beyond skepticism. It was that Britain had no place in the EU. Though she did not dare say so explicitly, Thatcher was now intimating to the British that they should contemplate leaving the EU. Nationalist statements on these lines started to appear in the British press. "Up yours, Delors" ran a famous headline in a British tabloid.

Amusing though this knock-about act was, it also represented the point at which Thatcher lost contact with broad public opinion and thus launched her party on its nosedive. The poll data should have made this obvious to her. Starting from the 1975 referendum, British voters - whether in real votes or in opinion polls - have almost always rejected the idea of withdrawal, usually by significant majorities. The 1975 referendum went 67-33 against withdrawal. This pattern was the rule throughout the Thatcher years. Whereas at the height of the 1980 budgetary crisis opinion split 26-65 against continued membership, this attitude was not sustained. By 1991 opinion had reversed itself, and despite eleven years of Thatcher's Euro-bashing, opinion ran 62-28 in favor of continued membership. These numbers have now narrowed, but 1997 polls still show support for outright withdrawal at under 20 percent. The risible showing of the rabidly anti-EU Referendum Party in the May election reinforces the point.

None of this means that the British are enthusiastic about the EU - as their answers to specific questions make clear. On monetary union, for example, or the powers of the European Parliament, the British, including the committedly pro-EU Liberal Democrats, betray a fair degree of suspicion toward EU institutions. But this does not imply that the British came (or come) anywhere near to accepting Thatcher's implied line that they are better out than in.

Over the years the British have significantly changed their views on their national priorities. In 1969 they ranked the United States and the Commonwealth comfortably ahead of Europe as "most important to Britain." By 1993, Europe outranked the Commonwealth and the United States by factors of three and four, respectively. Even in today's climate of EU gloom, Europe is ranked in first place by twice as many people as the Commonwealth and the United States. They may not find the EU warm and cuddly, but they have a clear notion of their national interest.

As Thatcher's anti-EU fanaticism caused her to stray ever further from that notion, her downfall became merely a matter of time. In 1989 the Conservatives suffered a significant set-back in the elections for the European Parliament. When Britain's EU isolation became plain to see at successive meetings of the European Council in Dublin and Rome, the time for action had come. Howe's devastating House of Commons speech of November 13 of that year, in which he accused Thatcher of presenting the country with a "false antithesis, a bogus dilemma" on EU matters, launched the Tory leadership contest that was eventually won by Major.

Thatcher learnt nothing from her rejection. Instead, she went onto the offensive. In her writings and speeches, particularly in the United States, she drew a highly tendentious contrast between the disintegration of central planning in Eastern Europe and its supposed reemergence in the EU. In taking this tack, she gave succor to the least responsible elements in her party. This, in turn, caused Major to rub his opportunity in 1992 to restore sense to Britain's EU posture. At that time, fresh from his surprising election victory, he could have secured parliamentary ratification of the Maastricht Treaty with a two-thirds majority. His failure to do so had the effect of delivering the Conservative Party to the Euro-rejectionists - and to the fratricidal strife that led to the 1997 debacle.

Of course, Thatcherism was and is about more than the EU. Her achievements on trade union reform, privatization, and the assertion of liberty will outlive her EU mistakes. Nonetheless, her perversity in this area has a long reach. It precipitated the first major crisis in Labour policymaking and will ensure that Britain is not among the first wave of EMU members. This means that, yet again, countries other than Britain will enjoy first dibs on setting the rules and habits of an EU institution that in the fullness of time Britain will undoubtedly need to join.

As the Tories begin their painful process of rebuilding, they need to ponder the Thatcher legacy dispassionately. A cool head will tell them that, thanks to Thatcher, they are at present saddled with an untenable European policy. In effect, this means their domestic policy is also untenable. With the opinion polls moving against Europe, they may be tempted to continue along this path, but the history of Britain's relationship with Europe strongly suggests that this will be a dead end.

Hague has inherited an unelectable party. The September 15 referendum on Scottish devolution (with Thatcher's opposition cited by The Scotsman as one of the reasons for the strong positive vote) showed that the party has not yet touched rock bottom. The turmoil following Hague's decision at the October party conference to commit the Conservatives to opposing Britain's entry into the European Monetary Union demonstrated that the party's internal divisions run as deep as ever.

On becoming Labour's leader in July 1994, Tony Blair faced a similarly dire situation. Having purged his party of its socialist undesirables, Blair now sits in Downing Street. If Hague really wishes to oust him, he needs to mete out the same treatment to his Thatcherite holdovers and diehards. Otherwise, British conservatism - together with the principles into which, before her anti-European aberration, Margaret Thatcher breathed so much new vitality - will join the ranks of the stuffed curiosities in the Natural History Museum.

Responses to Clarke

John O'Sullivan:

Jonathan Clarke claims that the Tory Party lost the recent election (and is now unelectable) because Mrs. Thatcher foisted an unpopular "Euro-rejectionist" policy upon it. Among the difficulties with this theory are:

Mrs. Thatcher ceased to be Prime Minister seven years before the election defeat. In the intervening years, she had little or no influence on government policy. Those who sympathized with her views on Europe were excluded from ministries which dealt with European issues. And her speeches critical of the government's European policy - to which Clarke now attributes an irresistible power - were widely (and I think unfairly) dismissed as inspired by personal bitterness at the time. By themselves, these facts should be enough to demolish Clarke's argument. But there is more.

Those who determined policy for most of this period - namely, Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, and Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine - were strong supporters of European integration and the single currency. (Prime Minister John Major can best be characterized as a weak supporter of the same things.) They remained in charge of policy until election day. Surely that suggests some culpability.

Their best way of evading responsibility for defeat would be to argue that the Cabinet's European policy began to fray in the last two years of office, and that it disintegrated entirely in the election campaign. Why did this happen? Very simply: support for "Europe" and the single currency was increasingly unpopular with Tory MPs, the Tory party in the country, the general public, and even a majority of the Cabinet. (You would never guess this, incidentally, from Clarke's use of opinion polls, which is worthy of Willi Munzenberg. He cites the 20 percent support for the most extreme anti-European position, but not the majority opposition to a single currency and to further European integration.) There was strong pressure for a change in policy. But Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine vetoed a clear statement of opposition to a single currency. Tory MPs - facing certain defeat and knowing from their canvassing that opposition to a single currency was almost the only popular policy available to the Tories - panicked and rebelled. Over two hundred Tory candidates declared themselves personally opposed to the euro. The party splintered publicly. Insofar as Clarke seeks to excuse John Major and his colleagues as policymakers from responsibility for the defeat, however, he condemns them as party managers.

Blaming this on Mrs. Thatcher is not analysis; it is astrology. As an occasional intellectual valet to the lady, I would be delighted to attribute the change in opinion to her speeches. Individuals may indeed have been influenced by them; I hope so. But mass or even party opinion is no longer swayed by Midlothian orations. The catalyst for the public was events - such as the European ban on British beef exports and the Spanish "poaching", sanctioned by the courts, of British fish stocks. For Tory politicians it was that "Europe" had gone from being an obstacle to socialism in the Seventies to being an obstacle to deregulated capitalism today. Perhaps they are wrong, but many German businessmen seem to agree with them.

Anyway, "Europe" was only a minor theme in the great symphony of Tory collapse. There were far more important reasons for it, including an epidemic of Tory scandals, both sexual and financial, that continued right up to election day; the loss of the crucial tax issue following several tax-raising budgets in the Major years; a general weariness with the same ministerial faces after eighteen years; the rise of an acceptable opposition party in the form of "New Labour"; and above all the fact that the Tories had thrown away their reputation as the party of economic competence and so were unable to benefit politically from the robust state that the economy had achieved by 1997. They destroyed their economic credentials in 1992 only months after their election victory; that destruction (or self-destruction) kept them at unprecedentedly low levels in the polls from then until now, and it involved something which is mysteriously absent from Clarke's account: namely, Britain's membership in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM).

The ERM was the euro of its day. All the clever people in politics, journalism, academia, the Foreign Office, and the City of London were in favor of going in, and only Mrs. Thatcher with her allegedly stubborn anti-Europeanism stood in the way. It took three years of pressure before Mrs. Thatcher yielded to this consensus of the great and good - only a few weeks before she lost office. Even then she qualified her agreement:

I insisted that we enter the wide band - 6 per cent on either side . . . I made it very clear to John Major [then chancellor of the exchequer] that if sterling came under pressure, I was not going to use massive intervention, either pouring in pounds and cutting interest rates to keep sterling down or raising interest rates to damaging levels and using precious reserves to keep sterling up. For me, willingness to realign within the ERM - as other countries had done - if circumstances warranted it, was the essential condition for entry (The Downing Street Years).

Her chancellor, by then her successor as prime minister, did exactly what she had warned against when sterling came under pressure in the ERM in 1992. He poured out billions of dollars in reserves and raised interest rates to a staggering 15 percent in a vain attempt to keep the pound in the ERM. When the pound was forced out (to the great benefit of George Soros among others), the central economic plank of Majorism was destroyed. For Major had fought the 1992 election on the argument that adhering to the discipline of the ERM was the key to Britain's economic recovery, explaining away the deep recession it inflicted on the British economy with the words: "If it isn't hurting, it isn't working." When Britain left the ERM and the British economy promptly outdistanced its continental rivals, this exposed the post-Thatcher Tories as economic incompetents - and worse, as arrogant economic incompetents because they failed to apologize for inflicting unnecessary economic distress on bankrupt firms, mortgage-holders now holding "negative equity", and the unemployed. The Tories never recovered from the public humiliations of "Black Wednesday", and hovered around 30 percent in the polls from then until this year's election. William Hague, the new Tory leader, finally recognized political necessity this October and apologized to the British people for the ERM fiasco in his first Tory conference speech.

Indeed, Clarke is altogether the victim of bad timing. Since he wrote his anti-Thatcher philippic, Anthony Seldon's biography of John Major (checked for accuracy by the former Prime Minister) has been published. And it deals a final coup de grace to Clarke's thesis. "Europe", it seems, did damage the Tories, but in exactly the opposite sense to Clarke's. For the biography reveals that the chancellor of the exchequer, Norman Lamont, wanted to leave the ERM on the morning of "Black Wednesday" when speculators attacked. But he was overruled by Major, who "bowed to pressure from the Cabinet's pro-European big beasts, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Clarke, to go the extra kilometer for the sake of Europe" and raised interest rates to 15 percent (London Times, October 9, 1997). That was the first landslip that led eventually to the Labour avalanche - and it was the result not of "Euro-rejectionism" but of Euro-fanaticism.

In short, Clarke's argument is utterly fanciful - so remote from the truth, in fact, that I wondered who he was and where he came from. Was he perhaps the Cambridge Tory historian, well known for his mischievous sense of humor? No, that Jonathan Clark lacks a final "e." Could he be one of those earnest mid-Western Ph.D.s, specializing in British political history, who are understandably confused to discover, late in their theses, that Philip Lloyd-Graeme, Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Viscount Swinton, and the Earl of Swinton are one and the same chap? Apparently not - his mistakes are not trivial ones. Clarke, I am told, is a former British diplomat, late of the Foreign Office. At once, all becomes clear. As an explainer of what has gone wrong with the Tories, Britain, and British policy towards Europe, Clarke is, ahem, flawed. But as an explanation he is almost too perfect.

Ferdinand Mount:

I don't think one can quarrel with the main argument that drives Jonathan Clarke's essay. In the later years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher did change from a severe but practical critic of the European Union's arrangements, especially but not exclusively as they applied to Britain, into a crusader against the whole idea, from skepticism in the proper sense of the word to fear and dislike. She would not, I think, have admitted to this change, preferring like most politicians to regard her attitude as one of unwavering consistency, but change there was. It helped to cost her the leadership of her party. And her supporters' rancor at her unseating helped to destroy the party at the polls seven years later.

I agree, too, that it would have been quite possible for her to continue the same robust critique of the European Union's workings in general, and of any excessive cost to Britain in particular, without lurching into such passionate xenophobia and paranoia. Even so, I think the path trod by her and her successor was bound to be stonier than Clarke allows for.

John Major had an overall majority of only twenty-one, with forty or more embittered Europhobes behind him who had nothing much to look forward to except retirement, and who had no particular compunction about destroying the party's election chances. Of course, he could have secured a handsome majority for the Maastricht Bill on Second Reading at any time. In voting on the principle of the Bill, the opposition parties would always be on their best behavior. But in Committee, whatever the timing of the Bill, they would lose no opportunity to savage and humiliate the government. That is what oppositions do. The same thing happened to Ted Heath with the original European Communities Bill in October 1971 - a majority of 112 on Second Reading, but tiny majorities as low as 4 in the later stages. In 1971, that didn't really matter so much; the party was fresh to office (having been elected in June 1970), the backbench opponents were ill-organized and had little public support. But in the 1990s, for a party which had already been in power so long, it was a poisonous running sore. To neglect the parliamentary arithmetic, as Clarke does, is to ignore the basic reality of British political life.

I also think Clarke is insufficiently skeptical about European Monetary Union in general, and more particularly about its suitability for Britain. EMU does offer real advantages: convenience to travelers and traders, removal of exchange-rate risk within the area and, if well managed, long-term monetary stability with consequent gains for investment and employment.

But it is far from clear that for Britain to join at the outset would be any more sensible than to be first in the queue for the new untested model of a motor car. By staying in the negotiations, Major did not forfeit the advantage Clarke mentions - of having a say in the arrangements - but he did leave Britain complete flexibility about whether or when to join. This stance is widely endorsed in Britain, mostly not for chauvinistic reasons but because our economy is still so different from those of our partners: in its responsiveness to interest rate changes, in our structure of housing finance, in the proportion of our trade that is done in dollars. These questions worry almost everyone in the British political world - Blair and Brown and most City bankers and exporters, especially the smaller ones, no less than Conservative politicians. Wise observers such as Professor Walter Eltis, Niall Fitzgerald of Unilever, and Martin Taylor of Barclays have warned of the dangers of joining when our economies are not properly in sync. Even if the system does not collapse quite soon after being set up, as Alan Greenspan is said to fear, it may impose fierce, politically unacceptable and economically unnecessary costs on the out-of-step members - of which Britain might well be one. This would be a silly sort of self-mutilation in a period when the British economy is relatively more successful than at almost any time since the war.

If the euro is to be a serious and durable currency, rather than a short-lived political gesture, there is much to be said for building it slowly with a membership that is comfortable with the rules and conditions. What's the hurry?

David Willetts:

Jonathan Clarke's piece reminds me of nothing so much as the outpourings of those extreme Euroskeptics whom he attacks. There is the same obsession with Europe and the comforting search for the one simple, exclusive cause of all our troubles - we are told that if only Conservatives had got the line on Europe right, everything would have been fine.

Clarke has one valid point: the Conservative Party is still coming to terms with the implications of signing the Single European Act in 1985. That was a measure of far greater constitutional significance than the Maastricht Treaty. Conventional nineteenth-century free trade simply meant accepting goods from other countries without tariffs, provided they met our domestic regulatory requirements. The Single Market goes way beyond that in at least three crucial respects.

First, it does not just cover goods but services, capital, and labor markets. Second, there is mutual recognition. If a Spanish car meets the safety standards, it should be sold in Britain with no further regulatory requirements. An academic qualification from a university in Bologna or Marseille should be valid throughout the European Union. Third, the market is to be policed by a supra-national authority, the European Court of Justice, with the power to intervene where individual nation-states are not complying with the terms of the Single Market. That is undoubtedly a significant move away from the traditional powers and prerogatives of the nation-state. In the decade since the Single Market was ratified Conservatives have experienced the same tensions as American Republicans over NAFTA, but even more acutely.

The greatest significance of "Europe" for Conservatives is ignored by Clarke. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the old ideological divide between capitalism and communism. Now the crucial intellectual and ideological battle is between two different models of capitalism. One of the most interesting Continental analyses of the battle is Michel Albert's book Capitalism versus Capitalism (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), while in Britain it is the theme of Will Hutton's appallingly influential The State We're In (London: Vintage, 1996). Both books argue that there is a choice for Britain to make between the European social model and what the critics call Anglo-American capitalism. It is a real choice. This battle of ideas is fought out in international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and above all the European Union. The authorities in Brussels explicitly see themselves as pursuing an agenda of creating a European social model. This means heavier regulation of the labor market. It means trade that is made "fair" by eliminating the "unfairness" of "social dumping." It means trying to create a uniform European model of corporate governance. It rests above all on the belief that the market is a bitter pill that can only be swallowed if it is generously sugarcoated with state subsidies.

As every day passes, the evidence mounts that it is the Anglo-American model that yields economic growth, rising prosperity, and more employment, while the European model threatens to bring back the old Euro-sclerosis of the 1970s. One of the things that we Conservatives tried - and sadly failed Y- to do in the 1997 General Election was to focus the British electorate's attention on this ideological divide. Tony Blair's agenda of signing up to the European Social Chapter, imposing a minimum wage, and placing himself in the tradition of European social democracy threatens much of what Margaret Thatcher and John Major have achieved since 1979. Our view of the world was caricatured as harsh and selfish, whereas Labour instead promised a cozier world of compassion, security, and "partnership." That is the real debate about the direction Britain must take and it is "Europe" that brings it to life.

John O'Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review.

Ferdinand Mount is editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

David Willetts is a member of the House of Commons.

Jonathan Clarke is a former British diplomat and currently a foreign affairs scholar at the Cato Institute. His most recent book is After the Crusade: American Foreign Policy for the Post-Superpower Age (Madison Books, 1995).